What China’s money means for the future of Asian football

CHINESE FOOTBALL HAS BEEN GRABBING THE HEADLINES RECENTLY, mainly due to the huge transfer fees that have been paid to entice players to head east. Guangzhou Evergrande Taobao have splashed the cash on Colombian striker Jackson Martínez while Jiangsu Suning have acquired Brazilians Ramires and Alex Teixeira for mouth-watering sums. These transfers have made headlines around the world, with plenty of commentators talking about how it may affect the European game, but the effect on football in the rest of Asia has been, to some extent, overlooked.

It is important to put these bank-breaking transfer fees in context. The winter transfer window is usually a quiet time in Europe compared to the summer window; teams are unwilling to break-up their squads by selling key players mid-season, and only the most desperate (or far-sighted) teams are willing to bring in a player who will more than likely take time to adjust to his new surroundings.

In China, on the other hand, this is the pre-season transfer window, so it is expected that Chinese clubs would want to spend big as they build their squads for the upcoming season, which for most of the biggest spenders includes an AFC Champions League campaign. This season, a large windfall from a new broadcasting rights deal has also given clubs some extra cash to splash, leading to an inflationary effect that was also seen in England when the Premier League’s latest TV deal came into place.

Two other factors have helped increase the fees even more. The inability for Chinese clubs to bring in free transfers – due to the July-to-July nature of many contracts – and the unwillingness for European clubs to sell in January, has meant that large sums have been necessary to acquire players that cost more to buy now than they would have if they had been targeted during the summer transfer window. Chinese clubs are also only allowed a limited number of foreign players in their team, meaning that spending that might be spread out over half-a-dozen or so signings is concentrated in one or two players instead. With the top Chinese players moving clubs for huge fees themselves, investment in the best foreign players possible makes sense from a sporting perspective as well as from the marketing side of things.

Although most of the players grabbing the headlines recently are South Americans playing in Europe, it is also worth remembering that Chinese clubs have been picking up some of the best South American players directly from their home continent over the last few years, cutting out the European middlemen. Shanghai SIPG’s Argentine playmaker Darío Conca, for instance, was reportedly the third highest paid player in the world when he was playing for Evergrande in 2011.

Guangzhou Evergrande Taobao are often seen as China’s first super club, and their two AFC Champions League wins suggest that they are the start of a real change in Asian football. Before 2013, the last time that a Chinese team won Asia’s top club competition was back in 1990 when Liaoning FC won what was then called the Asian Club Championship. Since then, Chinese football had been in the wilderness with Korean and Japanese sides winning six of the seven titles on offer between 2006 and 2012.

All that changed when Evergrande beat FC Seoul on away goals in the 2013 two-legged final. With players like Conca and Elkeson, who at the time was on the edge of breaking into the Brazilian national team, Guangzhou had been knocking on the door for a few seasons before their 2013 triumph. Last season, aided by Brazilian internationals Ricardo Goulart and former Tottenham Hotspur midfielder Paulinho, Guangzhou won their second AFC Champions League title in three years, cementing their dominance at the top of Asian football.

Recent investment in the Chinese game is still perhaps a generation away from baring fruit. The national team’s current FIFA ranking, just one place above that of the Faroe Islands, shows the size of the task at hand, and although the quality of Chinese domestic players will improve in time, it won’t happen overnight.

China will be hoping that their foreign superstars can help raise the game domestically in the short term, but they still have a long way to go before they will truly be a footballing superpower.